322 death and burial practices: The Americas goods reserved for a few individuals reflect the development of social ranking in ancient American societies In what is now the eastern United States, groups practicing a mix of hunting-collecting and limited agriculture participated in the Adena and Hopewell burial and ritual complexes (ca 1000 b.c.e.–400 c.e.) These widespread traditions focused on the practice of burying selected members of the community in artificial mounds accompanied by elaborate gifts, many obtained via long-distance trade At Adena sites in the Ohio Valley small communities built conical mounds, some as high as 70 feet, over circular or rectangular wooden structures that covered graves lined with clay or logs The dead were buried in the flesh, as secondary burials (meaning that the bodies had been allowed to decay to bones elsewhere before burial here), or as cremations The mounds grew in layers as burials were added over time The honored dead, who may have achieved their status by their abilities as traders or shamans, were accompanied by slate pendants, stone smoking pipes, and copper beads, bracelets, and breastplates Hopewell peoples (ca 200 b.c.e.–400 c.e.) in Ohio and Illinois erected mounds over log crypts or charnel houses that might contain a hundred or more cremations or burials The honored dead took with them thousands of objects, including stone pipes, copper axes and ornaments, freshwater pearls, shells traded from the Gulf of Mexico, and obsidian from the distant Rocky Mountains At one Ohio site, the many dead interred in the mounds took with them a total of 500 copper ear ornaments for luxury adornment in the afterlife, while one individual was accompanied by 300 pounds of obsidian imported from the distant Rocky Mountains At some Illinois sites crypts were reopened periodically for new arrivals and older remains shifted to other sections of the mound to make space In early agricultural villages in central Mexico of the Early Formative Period (ca 1800–1200 b.c.e.) the dead were frequently buried under the floors of their houses, presumably to keep ancestors in contact with the living At the same time the rise of centralized chiefdoms and states in Mesoamerica led to the creation of monumental tombs for elite figures At the Olmec site of La Venta (1200–400 b.c.e.) on the Gulf coast of Mexico, a stone tomb covered by a clay platform contained the remains of two children, who might have been royalty or sacrificial victims—with jade jewelry and figurines, mirrors of polished iron ore, ritual bloodletting implements, and red cinnabar pigment A crocodile-shaped stone sarcophagus at La Venta probably held an Olmec ruler, though the bones had disintegrated, leaving only the jade jewelry behind At the Chalcatzingo site in Mexico local rulers allied to those of La Venta were laid to rest in stone crypts under their palaces INSIDE A HOPEWELL BURIAL MOUND Hopewell burial mounds often contain numerous burials, thousands of artifacts made from such exotic materials as Gulf coast shells, Lake Superior copper, silver, meteoric iron, freshwater pearls, and coal, along with evidence of several ceremonial constructions For example, Mound 13 at the appropriately named site of Mound City, Ohio, a low, round pile of earth some feet high and 70 feet across, was built over the remains of two successive ritual buildings These buildings consisted of wooden poles driven into the ground and probably woven together to create an arched frame, which was then covered with sheets of bark, much like later Native American wigwams Only the depressions left by the rotted poles survive to tell us of the buildings’ shapes The second building seems to have been a funerary shrine where the bodies of the honored dead were cremated and rituals performed It was roughly square, measuring 40 by 42.5 feet It contained a 4-by-6-foot crematory, identified by a depression or pit where the soil was baked by repeated fires Four “altars”—small platforms of earth—supported groups of cremated human bones and deliberately broken objects, presumably meant to accompany the ancestors’ spirits into the hereafter Treatment of the dead may not always have been orderly by modern Western notions The structure also contained 13 piles of cremated remains and their associated ornaments of copper, mica, slate, and other materials, and in one central area of the floor fragmentary artifacts and cremated bones had been trampled into the earth by the feet of participants in the ceremonies At some point before the wooden building was buried under the mound, this central space ceased to be used for rituals and its stomped-upon relics were covered with sand Two shallow graves had been dug into the floor, but one clearly overshadowed the other in splendor and importance The excavators of the mound in 1920–1921, William Mills and Henry Shetrone, called the more elaborate burial the Great Mica Grave because it was completely lined with sheets of this silvery material, probably imported from the Carolinas The 6.5-by-7-foot grave was surrounded by a raised circle of mica pieces and soil containing broken stone smoking pipes—perhaps the possessions of a Hopewell shaman—as well as ornaments of animal teeth and chunks of another silvery mineral, the lead ore galena Within the shallow excavation the cremated remains of four people accompanied a copper ceremonial headdress Before the whole building was entombed beneath the earth mound, a small mound was erected over the Great Mica Grave, and it, too, received a shiny covering of mica sheets